It turns out that tech companies don’t sit outside of government as just ordinary vendors. This week on The Geek in Review podcast, we welcome back Texas A&M University School of Law professor Hannah Bloch-Wehba to talk about accountability of Big Tech, AI regulations, government surveillance, and the intertwining of public authority and private tech infrastructure. Bloch-Wehba traced the dependency between the two powers all the way back to the 1930s in her article “How Tech Took Over,” in how the tech sector became a foundation for national security and economic growth.
Today’s hybrid form of governance, where Bloch-Wehba explains how a handful of private companies supply data and cloud systems, along with decision-making infrastructures across multiple governmental agencies. It is a struggle for traditional constitutional doctrines to adjust to the modern technology and the operations provided by contractors that are providing their core foundational operations.
The issues also enter into the criminal law enforcement areas and Bloch-Wehba’s “Rights, Knowledge, and Capture in the Datafied State,” discusses how trade-secret claims are throwing a barrier between proprietary data systems and criminal defendant’s ability to examine the systems that are being used to convict them in the courts. There is a strangeness in the judicial systems where corporate choices are shaping the legal process being followed, rather than corporate governance following established legal norms.
Bloch-Wehba’s “Information Law Pluralism” covers how privacy rules, audits, impact assessments, disclosure duties, researcher access, and independent review as parts of a broader system governing exactly how knowledge is shared, validated, and even produced. There seems to be no single device that transparently provides accountability. In addition, she lists how a political campaign program against states attempting to regulate AI companies and products is weakening state transparency even further.
Finally, we cover Bloch-Wehba’s “Rethinking Federal Support for Journalism” where she argues that platform payments give rise to the risk of replacing a governmental dependency gets switched for journalist and new organizations being financially tied to companies they must scrutinize. Ideas floated like an AI tax provide some alternative funding possibilities for supporting local and public-interest journalists.
LINKS
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- Hannah Bloch-Wehba’s website
- Hannah Bloch-Wehba, Texas A&M University School of Law
- “How Tech Took Over,” SSRN
- “Rights, Knowledge, and Capture in the Datafied State,” SSRN
- “Information Law Pluralism,” Indiana Law Journal
- “Who’s Regulating Police Technology? It’s Not the Courts,” Tech Policy Press
- “Rethinking Federal Support for Journalism,” Knight First Amendment Institute
- Google Maps: Updates to Location History and on-device Timeline storage
- National Science Foundation Act of 1950
- National Science Foundation history
- Flock Safety license plate reader cameras
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[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca